How to change ownership of your InMotion Hosting account

There are times when you may need to change the ownership or administrative information of your hosting account to another person. This is more common with businesses as they may need to change who controls the information when someone leaves the company. It is also common if someone decides to sell their website and includes the hosting account as part of the deal.

While there is not a specific order in which you need to change the information, you do need to be sure to change several different things. Below is a quick guide on the information you want to pay attention to when changing account ownership

Domain WhoIs information

Domain names have a lot of different information related to them. There are four distinct contact points and a single owner. The first thing you want to ensure is that the contact information for the domain is changed. Note that this information does not change the registered owner of the domain, this cannot be done via the Account Management Panel.)

Domain name ownership

The domain name's legal owner, known as the registrant can only be changed by the InMotion Support Department. You will need to submit a request directly to the Live Support Department to have this completed.

Credit card, primary email address, & contact information

You will certainly need to change the credit card information to the new owner, or at least remove your own card so the new owner can enter their new information. Also, be sure to change all the contact information for the account. There is only room for one person in the information, so be sure to change it to the person most likely to be dealing with the account. The primary email address is especially important. This is the email address used to log into the AMP (Account Management Panel), so ensure that the primary email address belongs to the person most likely to manage the account.

cPanel and AMP passwords

Although the new owner will likely change the cPanel password once they have taken over, it is a good idea to change the cPanel and AMP passwords to a temporary one. This is because most people tend to use a password for multiple things so there is no reason to risk a security compromise here.

This is very helpful, but it is not consistent with what support is telling me at this time. A week ago, when I inquired about this, what they said was consistent with what you are saying. So, when I contacted them today and asked them to release the domain so that I could give it to the new owner, I was expecting that they would create an AMP account for the domain and provide the EPP Code to release the domain. Now, they are telling me that they don't create a new AMP account, which I find strange since they created a new AMP account for another one of my domains just because I was having an email issue with it. I don't always get the same person so the different responses could be due to a different level of understanding. And, I need the email to continue to operate while we do the ownership transfer. That seemed to add a magnitude of complexity (although I don't understand why, meaning it seemed simple enough to me). The agent I was chatting with about doing the release of the domain seemed overwhelmed by that necessity.

All I am trying to do is separate the add-on domain from my other domains, that is, put that registration in its own AMP account, strip out my data, and give control of that domain to the new owner. I really don't need to do anything else, because the new owner is going to set everything up they way they want it. The only other thing that I was trying to do was to make certain that email was not interrupted. I don't have anything to do with whether the new owner keeps the registration on inmotion or moves it elsewhere.

Sometimes the inconsistencies in support depend upon what we're being told by the customer. Earlier you said, "It still leaves me with a problem. I am not transferring the original domain, but, an add-on domain. The article does not explain how to do that." You left this comment at the bottom of this article which is about changing ownership of account. This article does not make any point of "transferring a domain". It does talk about changing the domain's contact information. Transferring a domain refers to moving a domain to another domain registrar - not transferring ownership to another person. You describe transfer a domain to another registrar when you say, "Provide a EPP release code." You will not need to obtain the EPP code if you're keeping the domain with the same domain registrar. That should not be necessary if the person you're transferring the domain to is using the same domain registrar.

So there may be some confusion in regards to that point, because the creation of a new AMP account is only necessary if you're creating a separate (and new) hosting account. When you say,

"All I am trying to do is separate the add-on domain from my other domains, that is, put that registration in its own AMP account, strip out my data, and give control of that domain to the new owner."

Then yes, you are specifically saying that you want to create a separate hosting account. However, the person that you're giving the account to is who should really be creating it, not you. In terms of email service, as long as you are NOT moving the domain to a different registrar, then the DNS containing the MX (mail server) records will remain here and there should be no interruption of service. The new account should be in the name of the domain name that you're giving to the new owner.

A hosting account typically consists of a domain registration subscription and a hosting service subscription. The domain registration may not necessarily be with the same registrar. Our apologies if the support agent you were talking to was confused over the fact that you were trying to establish a new hosting account. If you are creating the new account in place of the new owner, you should inform the new owner that you will need to put the account in their name and credit card. Also, make sure that they understand that the website has two subscriptions of service - one for maintaining the domain name, and the other for the hosting service.

I hope this helps to explain the issue. Our apologies again if there was confusion in regards to your support call. Please let us know if you have any further questions or comments.

If you're moving an add-on domain to its own account, then you basically use the add-on domain as the primary domain in the new account. You would have to transfer all of the files from the root of the folder containing the add-on domain and place them in the public_html of the new account (assuming you're hosting with us). Once the files have been transferred (and you have a backup), then you should remove the add-on domain from the previous account. You should delete it BEFORE you enable the primary domain in order to prevent confusion with the DNS. Since they're on the same DNS, once you delete the add-on domain , then activate the new account, it should come up as soon as DNS updates at InMotion. If you need to transfer the database, see Creating, Importing and Exporting Databases.

I hope this helps to answer your question, please let us know if you require any further assistance.